You Can Now Stop Seeing Video Feeds of Participants in Zoom Meetings

Zoom has added a new feature called 'stop incoming video' that allows users to block video feeds of other participants in a meeting. With the latest feature, Zoom users in a meeting can easily disable all incoming videos. If you are using a restricted connection, this feature will help preserve bandwidth for shared content. Zoom has also made security and audio enhancements to meetings with a new update. The host and co-host in a meeting can now also check what security features are currently in effect. Zoom is bringing support for rich text formatting in chat. Also, there's a new feature for Android that allows Zoom Android users to pay for a Pro subscription using Google Play billing instead of doing it directly through Zoom.

Zoom announced the addition of the ‘stop incoming video' option via a support page. With this feature, users in a meeting can disable all incoming video through in-meeting controls. Zoom said that this feature allows preserving bandwidth for shared content. The account owner and admins can enable this for use in meetings at the account-, group-, and user-level web settings.

How to enable 'stop incoming video' feature

Sign in to the Zoom Web portal as an admin. In the navigation menu, click Account Management then Account Settings. Click the Meeting tab. Under In-meeting (Advanced), click the "stop incoming video" feature toggle to enable or disable it. If a verification dialog displays, click Enable or Disable to verify the change.

If you want to make this setting accessible to all users in your account, you can click the lock icon, followed by Lock to confirm the settings.

Zoom's new security settings overview feature allows the host and co-host in a meeting to check what security features are currently in effect. These details can be accessed through the in-meeting encryption shield located in the top-left corner of the meeting.

Also, Zoom has introduced rich text formatting support for all platforms for composing a new message, replies, and editing messages. This includes bold, italics, underlining, strikethrough, highlight, text color, font size, bulleted and numbered lists, hyperlinks, and indenting for desktop. Mobile apps will get the ability to bold, italicise, strikethrough, underline, and create a bulleted or numbered list.

Android users in selected countries can purchase a monthly or annual Zoom Pro subscription in the Zoom app through the Google Play subscription service. Subscriptions are limited to 1 license and are managed through Google Play and not the Zoom Billing page in their account.

Zoom has also introduced minor UI and UX improvements as well as certain bug fixes and performance improvements. Notably, users need to have Zoom client version 5.8.0 or higher on an Android, iOS, Windows, or Mac machine to access all the above-mentioned features. Zoom confirmed that the iOS release requires Apple approval and it may take a few additional days to appear in the App Store.

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